Week 1 & 2
It's the start of ISMA 5006 and myself and James Broderick are starting the pre-production of ISMA 5008 (our final major practical project); this will be our first feature title as an independent games company.
We will be following this work flow I made back in ISMA 5002 to make sure we are on track and going in the right direction:
At the beginning of the week we decided to go to the botanic gardens to get some inspiration and to get away from technology for a while. Here are a few of the photographs I took and sketch I did that day:
Getting back into the labs we started out by writing a tone of post-it notes on what we wanted to be in the game and the ideas we had. We quickly came up with some characters, an environment and themes that we wanted. The hard bit was to now try and apply narrative to the project and narrow down the mechanics and gameplay elements.
After having a set of characteristics I went off and started to develop some characters and also did some anatomy sketches for practice:
I'm still not 100% on what I want the characters to look like but I'm slowly narrowing down an art style as we develop the narrative more. Here are my moodboards for the characters and environment so far:
We have recently moved onto refining the narrative by watching lots of YouTube videos, reading books and doing online research into our themes. I'm not going to go into depth on what the game is about as it will spoil the entire plot. However I can say we have a main character named Phe (short for Phoebe) who is a strong female character that is more gender neutral and androgynous. The game is set in 2002 and I have started to create a music playlist for Phe on Spotify to help me understand who she is as a person: PHE'S PLAYLIST
You can start to pick out little themes we are going with from this image. We moved the relevant post-it notes over to this board and added more to flesh out the story, characters, town and mechanics.
Over the next couple of weeks myself and James will continue to solidify our narrative and start working on a prototype and benchmark for the game.